Parents, don't be immune to vaccine truths

But slowly, and surely, we doctors have started to find our voice. In 2008, Larry King had McCarthy on his show again, but this time she sat next to American Academy of Pediatrics President David Tayloe and UCLA pediatrician Harvey Karp, both of whom calmly rebutted her anger and expletives. We've launched campaigns to give parents some straight talk about vaccines, such as Why I Choose and Every Child by 2. We've written books -- "Autism's False Prophets" and "Do Vaccines Cause That?!" -- that have exposed some ugly truths about the anti-vaccine community.

Most important, we now have more than 30 studies vouching for the safety of vaccines, with more on the way.

Despite all of this, though, you may still be confused and worried. That's because vaccine opponents keep shifting their hypothesis as to what actually causes autism.

In the early part of the decade, it was the MMR vaccine itself. But multiple studies demonstrated its safety. Then anti-vaccine folks moved to thimerosol, a preservative in vaccines. This too was discounted in many studies, including one early last year that showed that even though thimerosol is out of vaccines, autism rates continue to rise. Now the opponents are stuck somewhere between blaming other components of vaccines or the number of shots in the schedule. After we spend millions of your healthcare dollars to disprove these hypotheses, they'll move the target to something else.

And as they run out of ingredients to blame, they've turned their ire against pediatricians, painting them as some monolithic group of people who march to the beat of drug companies, both parties bent on making profits from vaccines at the expense of children.

That notion reeks of absurdity. First, pediatricians live in, and care for children in, communities all over the country. Our profession, in fact, rose with the advent of public health in the early 20th century. At that time, countless children lived in disease-infested tenements. Mass vaccination became a bedrock of our strategy to save their lives and give them a chance to grow up, and it worked beyond our wildest hopes. Second, for many doctors, the mere cost of buying vaccines is outstripping profits from administering them.

Over the years, we doctors haven't given you a lot of reasons to trust us. But if there's one subject we are right on, it's vaccines -- they're safe and effective. Like all things in medicine, they have side effects. But autism isn't one of them.

So please, talk with your pediatrician. Yes, we are stressed out and hurried in modern medical practice. But I can bet you that any of us would rather slow down to help you make the right decision than slow down because you bring your child into our office dying from bacterial meningitis, something that happened earlier this year in Minnesota.

It's a hot, flat and crowded world, one in which vaccine-preventable diseases can spread by a weekend drive down the 405 or, as in the case of the recent San Diego measles outbreak, by a trip to Europe.

For those who do choose to vaccinate, thank you for choosing health. Not just for your child and your family, but also for your community as well.

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Parikh, a Walnut Creek, Calif., physician, writes the Vital Signs medical column for Salon.com. He has no financial relationships to drug or vaccine manufacturers. www.rahulkparikh.com